Chapter 43

Ramon POV

Then Hutchins’s hands moved to Lake’s throat.I watched—frozen with horror—as the drunk man’s fingers wrapped around Lake’s neck in an eerie echo of the bruises I’d seen earlier. Lake’s eyes went wide, his body going rigid as Hutchins squeezed, cutting off his air while muttering increasingly disturbing things about what he planned to do.

“Gonna use you up,” Hutchins was saying, his voice thick with alcohol and arousal. “Gonna fuck you so hard you’ll feel it for days. Gonna mark up this pretty body until everyone knows you’re just a whore who’ll spread for anyone with enough money...”

Every protective instinct I possessed was screaming at me to intervene, to tear that door down and rip Hutchins away from Lake before he could make good on any of those threats.

My hand was actually on the corridor’s exit door when Alex grabbed my arm.

“Wait,” he hissed urgently.

“Look.”On the monitor, something had changed. Hutchins’s aggressive move